


Eddie Chronicles

by nb_richie (shipit)



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, Vignettes, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-03-09
Packaged: 2019-03-22 05:14:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 4,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13757049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shipit/pseuds/nb_richie
Summary: A series of short vignettes written by Eddie in his discovery of sexuality and affections for Richie





	1. Needlepoint

He takes off his glasses sometimes when they’re foggy or the dirt of the day has made them too opaque to look through. Every time he does, I get to see all of his freckles like needle pinpricks, needlepoint sewn on his cheeks. They shift when he smiles. Dancing and playing across his face, mesmerizing me.

If he catches me staring, he laughs and puts his chunky glasses back on. His hair is wild where it surrounds his face and he holds himself like he doesn’t know how beautiful he is. 

I’m not allowed to think about that. He asks me why I’m so quiet and I make up a half-assed excuse about thinking of something, anything else.

My stupid, idiot friend laughs because he buys it and his needlepoint freckles spin again and I’m lost in them. He stands up and he dances to music only he can hear and he drags me to my feet to dance with him. As he twirls me around and around and around I move like his needlepoint freckles.


	2. Rosary Beads

My rosaries click in my fingers as I plead with them restlessly. For hours it seems, I’ve knelt in front of my bed and prayed. Stale heavy breath crowds the air above my head as my mother watches. 

I can still see “Faggot” spray-painted on my locker. Red paint. Laughter rings in my ears. I remember being pressed to a warm chest that smelled like smoke and generic detergent. Hands with long fingers curled in my hair as a deep voice promised me that what they say doesn’t matter. That’s easy to say when you don’t have to kneel and pray for God to make it all go away. This sickness, this thing that’s killing me. 

More prayers from my lips that come out jumbled and wrong as I quiver and I can’t tell if it’s because of my failed prayers earning God’s wrath or my mother standing over me. She did not raise a faggot. She did not raise a faggot she did not raise a faggot shedidnotraiseafaggotshedidnotraiseafaggot. 

Now my lungs are failing. Cold plastic jammed into my mouth forces them to draw in oxygen again and I hate that I need it. 

From my limp fingers fall the rosary beads and I struggle to pick them back up for too long. 

Tonight when I crawl into bed I ask God for forgiveness yet again. He does not answer. 


	3. Windowsill Cigarettes

He offers me a puff of his cigarette like he doesn’t know that they’ll kill you, doesn’t know that we’re both half dead anyways. His smoking makes him calm. It settles his bouncing leg and the gash inside his cheek where he bites when he’s trying too hard to hold back a smart mouth- Trashmouth- comment. 

As he sucks down from his smoke, his voice gets deeper, rougher, but calmer too. This version of him is soft and secret and just for when his feet dangle over the edge of my windowsill. His buck tooth grin is more genuine. I like to call him mine when he smokes out the window I pop the screen out of every night in hopes he might come by and soothe the emptiness I feel when he isn’t around. 

Through his cloud he tells me he thinks he likes a boy in his fifth period math class. My brain screams at me that this means he could like me, but also someone else has his attention, but also that he’s going to hell and I should pray for his eternal soul. My silence is too much and he starts to climb out before I can force myself to say that it doesn’t bother me, him liking a boy.

It’s a lie. It bothers me, but not for the reason that he thinks. 


	4. On the Bathroom Counter

He shows up in my doorstep with a black eye, a bloody lip, and a bouquet of roses that’s seen better days. Even though he never cries, not in front of me, he sniffles. Wipes the back of his hand over his nose. Blinks back at me with dewy eyes behind bug glasses. 

I let him inside and he throws the red, dead and dying roses on my floor. I can’t be angry. He lets me take him upstairs to care for what he doesn’t have to tell me was done by the boy who he liked. While he sits on the bathroom counter and makes sad pained noises, I clean away the blood and try to avoid my sudden urge to kiss it better. If I could- if it would work, and he would let me- I wouldn’t be able to avoid it. 

My face is too hot and my fingertips get stuck in the caverns of his cheekbones. His laughter is harsh and angry sounding and he pulls my hands away. I’ve forgotten my place. I should apologize but I suddenly forget how to speak, to breathe.

He tells me I should calm down and makes a joke about my mother that fizzles and dies in the air between us. Now I want to run away but this is my house and his hands on my wrists keep me still. For a second at least, we’re still. 

His face is so close to mine and I feel his breath on my lips. I could kiss him right now.

I don’t. 

He kisses me. It’s quick and fleeting and intoxicating and I feel like crying when he pulls away. He laughs but it’s wrong. Then he apologizes and leaves. 


	5. Laughter

Usually his laugh is bright. Infectious, consuming. It’s the kind that makes me feel warm inside when I look around and see everyone feeling it like I do. 

Now his laugh is flat and painful, forced because he has forgotten how to laugh around me. I never see him anymore excepting when all our friends gather together. They can tell that something is wrong but they don’t know what. I’ve stolen his laughter from them all and I should just leave. 

No one follows me when I get the courage to run away and I can’t find it in me to be upset about it. The only thing I can hear is his dead laughter that I killed. The memory of his mouth on mine for just a split second makes me hate what I’ve done even more.

I’ve stolen his laughter and he’s stolen my heart. 


	6. Fairy F*ggot Boy

Their words dig in sharp like their fingernails and belts. I am a fairy faggot boy, they pound it into my skull. They had heard from someone who heard from someone who heard from someone who heard from someone that I have a thing for one buck toothed Richard “Trashmouth” Tozier. 

With every punch they remind me that people like me are not welcome here and I will regret stepping foot in their town. 

Fireworks explode in front of my eyes but I can’t hear them through my screaming. Hands hold me up. Cold metal carves a surgical grin because fairy faggot boys should smile. 

My salty tears burn it. All I can think is that if they kill me, maybe God will finally forgive me. Whatever they do to me, it doesn’t matter anymore. 

Before they leave, they sneer at me because I’m a fairy faggot boy and they aren’t sorry. I just lay there and smile a smile that I don’t want on my face.

Sticky red like the paint on my locker pools beneath my head and plasters my hair in ugly clumps. I reach up clumsy fingers to smooth it out, but with no success. 

Footsteps rain around me and I think they’re going to call me more names and slice more smiles on me, but no more pain comes. Loud voices. Angry voices. I’m lifted from the ground and I smell ash and detergent. 

Soft pinned porcelain doll curls brush my cheek and stick in the blood from my half smile that curls under my eye.

Why am I laughing as the gurney drags me away?


	7. Carnations

He’s the only one in the room when I wake up. All bruised under eyes and chapped lips, he speaks voicelessly to failing to take care of himself the way he should. His fingers twitch with a desperate ache for a smoke when he says he’s glad I’m awake. He brought me flowers. 

They aren’t roses because roses mean love. On the nightstand sits a vase of pink carnations. If it didn’t tug my new smile painfully, I’d offer him a real one because this means I’m back in his good graces, right? At the very least, he must care because he’s waiting right here for me. 

Even though I don’t ask, he tells me the reason my mother isn’t here is that she said she does not have a son if he’s chosen to be a queer. No boy of hers. He laughs sadly and I learn that his father says the same things to him, sometimes with the hot end of a cigar. He needs my comfort too but I can’t give it. Never again. I’m broken, the scar I know my cheek has attests to that. He should get out of this town, get as far away from its pain as possible. 

I must’ve said something out loud because he shakes his head and says he won’t go anywhere without me. He plucks a carnation from the vase and presses it into my hand like a kiss of pink petals and promises before he leaves. 


	8. New Home

He sneaks me in through his window at night and gives me packets of chips that are half-stale and greasy. While at lunch all of our friends help, he can only do so much when it came to dinner. We take turns showering quickly, never turning off the water so that his parents won’t know. He never looks at me, but I have my moments where my eyes trace the lean lines of his long legs. It’s too hard not to.

Then we go back to his room and he dresses me in his clothes that are made for someone much taller and with a much more aggressive style, but I love them anyway. He smiles as he hands me his shirts but he doesn’t ever look me in the eyes. Not when I pull on his boxers, not when I crawl into his bed, not when he wraps his body around me to keep me safe in the night.

I wake up before he does and climb out the window to meet another friend outside, his golden hair still a mess from sleep as he hands me a plastic grocery bag containing his clothes. He’s the only one who has anything that could fit me. I give him yesterday’s bag of dirty ones and thank him. He tells me it’s okay and says he wishes he could do more.

After climbing back in the window, I kneel at the foot of the unmade bed and pray for forgiveness that I have not earned and do not deserve.


	9. Smile

No one likes to see me anymore because of my smile. Teachers’ eyes skate over me and he hates to see what I look like now. How can I blame him when I hate looking in the mirror even more now too? Even scarred over, my smile is pink and thick and ugly and accomplishes its goal of making sure that no one will ever look me. This is my punishment for daring to think the things that I do about my best friend.

He tells me that what I’m feeling isn’t true, that I’m still lovable, and runs his thumb over my smile. Gives me character, he says, like it’s just a dent in a car and not a hole ripping it apart. When I pretend to believe him, it makes him feel less guilty. 

I see them in the halls sometimes, after their red paint on my locker makes another appearance, and they shove me to the ground with laughter. Fairy faggot boy still smiles. My head crashes against the floor with a gunshot noise and they leave me to be found by no one until I drag myself home.

My bruises hide beneath my shirt but nothing can hide my smile.


	10. Circle Burns

He takes off his jacket and his arms are covered in circle burns that he won’t explain but I understand anyways. Today I cannot go home because my inhaler was found on the bathroom counter and if I go, I will die. No longer is he allowed to bring home boys because he cannot have the same sickness as me. Instead, he brings home orange curls that mirror his own to convince his father that he doesn’t need the lesson that the circle burns teach.

Now that I have nowhere to go, I sleep under my own porch and sneak into the house through the back door when my mother goes to work so that I can shower, get dressed, and eat whatever I’m able to sneak out of the house. Most days I’m late to first period, but the teacher does not punish me because she knows the circles under my eyes and my smile too well.

Eventually the circle burns stop appearing on his arms and he stops wearing jackets to school. His lie, his cover up, stops being that and becomes something real with kisses that blow ash towards me and make my stomach turn. The two of them make their own circle burns on the ratty fabric inside his car when the smoke gets thick enough to hide what they do.


	11. Untied Shoelaces

Untied shoelaces that he trips on that make him fall on top of me that make our lips come together. But when he lifts himself up on his arms, he looks at me, at my eyes, at my mouth, and kisses me again. This time it isn’t an accident. I’m frozen because this goes on too long and God will never forgive me and neither will his girlfriend.

I thaw out when he holds my face like he doesn’t see the smile that was forced upon me. For the first time, I let myself feel him, let myself cling to him. The guilt can and will haunt me later but for now I’m not at all sorry that we’re doing this. He cradles my head so that it doesn’t have to rest on the floor anymore. I worship his skin that’s salty with sweat and tell him that he’s beautiful, that I love him, and the spell breaks because he doesn’t love me and there’s a head of orange curls in the doorway yelling.

He jumps off of me and makes excuses and she says that she knew, she knew that I was still what he wanted. She knows nothing because he never wanted me, I should have understood that. He apologizes and over and over again he calls her baby and says please but she doesn’t want to hear it.

Then she tells him that they’re over. Silence drips between them before he hugs her close and she puts her lips to his ear to say something, I don’t know what. It makes them both smile though, and when he comes back to me he isn't sad. He helps me to my feet and says we should talk and suddenly I forget how to breathe all over again.


	12. Rosebud

The rosebud has been nipped from the bush too soon but it still makes my heart flutter when he presses it into my hand and tells me he’s been stupid. I agree, but I tell him that I’ve been stupid too. He holds my hand without the rosebud in it and keeps his mouth shut while I pray to God to let me live in peace. It means so much more, considering he confessed one night over a windowsill cigarette that he can’t bring himself to believe in a god anymore.

We walk to nowhere in particular together, happy until a car with a sputtering engine and cracked leather seats pulls up beside us. The window rolls down and my mother screams for me to come home, that I can’t handle living without her, that I need her, that if I don’t come home then that Tozier boy will kill me and please Eddie-Bear just come home.

He jumps in front of me and yells at her that she’s a horrible excuse for a mother, but then he looks back at me and my scraped knees and my smile and my face that has sunken in from not enough food for too much time. I don’t look at him as he opens the car door for me. I clutch the rose bud tightly in my hand, so tight that the thorns dig into my soft palm and I hiss in pain.

Until tomorrow, and he’s just a pinprick in the distance.


	13. Only Sixteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I missed yesterday! Two updates today to make up for it <3

Straight to the hospital to check me for diseases that I don’t have while my mother cries fake tears because she was so worried about me after I left (was kicked out of) home. Only sixteen, only sixteen and I think that I’m ready to be out in the world alone. If she hadn’t seen me with the one who took me from her I would be lying in a ditch somewhere and she wails that she’s glad I’m okay.

She’s the only one who looks at my face besides him. Her beady eyes water up when she looks at the smile that reminds her that I am a fairy faggot boy who she abandoned while I was in the hospital coming to terms with what had been done to me. Only sixteen and disfigured and did the cops ever catch those boys who did this to her little Eddie-Bear?

Only sixteen and I wish I was dead rather than live through this again.

After the doctors convince her I’m okay, she takes me home and sits me down at the table to lay down the conditions of staying in her house because I’m only sixteen and I don’t know what’s best because I’m a stupid child. I’m not allowed to be anywhere other than here or school, and most importantly I’m not to talk to that Tozier boy. She throws away my rosebud and when I cry, she hugs me so close that I’m suffocating.

I may be only sixteen but she has to accept that I like boys, and when I say that she collapses in sobs.


	14. Bread in the Wine

She thrusts me into the church and asks them to fix me please like I’m her car engine on the third Saturday of every month. They calm her and when I take holy communion and dip my bread in the wine, they ask me if I accept the Lord into my soul as my savior and I say yes. Shame penetrates my skin because I have sinned every time I looked at or thought about my best friend who is now more than that, I think. 

For hours I kneel in front of the altar, until my knees ache and I can’t breathe because the weight on my chest is too much. Who am I to defy the laws set by God, when I am an ant and he is the child with the magnifying glass offering safety to the good and the kind? I don’t know when I started crying but now it’s all I can do. I want to wipe away the grime, the invisible film on my body that came as a result of the depravity that I’ve allowed.

My skin burns where his hands have been but I pretend not to feel it because eventually, they’ll let me go home. At six in the evening my mother takes me from their custody and brings me home. She feeds me unevenly heated soup and pleads with me to be the good Christian boy that she thinks she raised. I wish I could be. If it was my choice, I would erase this feeling of wanting what I’m not allowed to touch.


	15. Drink

I can’t tell him what’s wrong until he hands me a glass bottle full of something that tastes like forgotten dreams and it coats my mouth, throat and brain with inhibitions. Apologies tumble over each other on my tongue because God hates me, God hates us. He tells me it’s not true, but what does he know because I don’t think he’s ever been to church in his life.

He cries when I say that and leaves me on the side of the road with my glass bottle to stumble back home and slither into my window just like I left earlier in the night. I am a snake. I am the pinnacle of evil. I can’t get his crushed expression out of my head all weekend, or even when I come back to school on Monday to find him waiting at my locker with a blinding grin. 

More apologies come out, word vomit and the smile drops off his face. Arms rest around me and press me to the smell of ash and detergent and he promises that he isn’t mad, can’t be when it isn’t even my fault. I want to believe him but I can’t because nothing in life is simple and it never has been. He is mine and I am his and for once in my life I’m not scared when I say that I love him, over and over and over and over again like a mantra, a prayer in its own right. His tears drip onto my hair when he says that he loves me too.


	16. Matching Ties

The ties we wear to the winter formal match, just like our smiles match and how our hands and lips fit together. Tonight is supposed to be magical. We’ll dance and laugh and spend time with our friends and be happy because happiness is sometimes just that easy to find, he tells me with a cigarette in his mouth that I wrinkle my nose at.

He was wrong that tonight would be fun because they all come back. It’s worse because now I have him with me, proof that I am exactly what they said all those months ago. Was their lesson not good enough for me? Fairy faggot boy with the smile needs to be taught all over again what we do to queers.

I say that we need to go because they don’t want us here but he’s stubborn and he won’t leave. He doesn’t want to let them win. Because I’m a coward, and my scar twinges in remembrance, I run away and I hide behind a table while he takes the pain that they give him. Not once does he cry while they beat him bloody black blue.

When he comes back to me, he smiles and says that everything’s okay and that he’s glad they didn’t hurt me. We go back to his house, where his parents haven’t been in too many days to count, and as I clean him up he finally breaks down into tears.


	17. Hate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a hard time responding to comments but honestly, thank you all so much for all the nice things that you've said about this fic <3 It made my day to read them. I love y'all so much

Hate lives in my forced smile and his broken one. Hate lives in the bedroom next to mine late at night. Hate lives in the circle burns of his arms. Hate lives in my chest when I walk into the arched dome of the cathedral and cry and keep my head down and wish that I wasn’t a broken demon who God will never forgive, who God will never love the way he does all his other children. Once again I’m struck by how much everyone in this world wishes I would just die because I don’t love girls the way that good little Christian boys should.

People like to stare at me when I walk down the street. They whisper behind their hands about everything wrong with me, and I wish I didn’t care but I do. Nothing can change the fact that I care too much.

I come home every night and my heart burns with all the fire that comes along with the hate that seeps into every crevice of my life and body. The only way to flush it all out, even if for just a moment, is to lay my hands on needlepoint freckles and kiss him. When we kiss, I am truly home, not just in a house that I have to call so. He holds my hips, my face, whatever he can reach, and it makes me feel happy, even if for only a moment.

Sometimes we compare the hate that lives in our scars, in my smile and in his circle burns and he tells me that it gives us character. Now, I’ve learned to believe him, and I’ve found that I’m so much better for it.

**Author's Note:**

> Catch me on tumblr @nb-richie


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